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Streaming flac would theoretically take too much bandwidth. It's quite rare that you see people able to ABX a 320 kps encoded file ( and I mean with good encoders like Lame) , from lossless .Even 320 kps is an overkill most of the time. Similarly , for the digital television , data is compressed before you receive it , in order to save some bandwith.Never I've seen anyone complaining of the compression artifacts while looking at a digital TV.

I guess the more interesting question is whether you can do it under a bunch of constraints (on the hardware used on both ends, on your budget, etc.). On both the server and the client side, there are a lot more devices that can handle MP3 than FLAC. So again, the question becomes whether you can go with FLAC under constraints on your setup.

Never I've seen anyone complaining of the compression artifacts while looking at a digital TV.

You've obviously never watched Freeview or Freesat in the UK. Many channels are routinely bad (by which I mean that they are broadcast at a bit rate that renders block artefacts inevitable, before any transmission path interference), and the sport, in particular football on Channel 5 or ITV 4, is almost unwatchable.

You've obviously never watched Freeview or Freesat in the UK. Many channels are routinely bad (by which I mean that they are broadcast at a bit rate that renders block artefacts inevitable, before any transmission path interference), and the sport, in particular football on Channel 5 or ITV 4, is almost unwatchable.

It's off-topic but these are exactly my thoughts, Freeview can be terrible, rather than have nice looking TV they lower the bitrates and cram in more channels.

I've seen questions like this before and my simple answer is yes, you can stream FLAC..

But, I would ask that you not do so. Wasting bandwidth on the internet at large is not a practice I'm fond of.. You're free to do so, but it contributes to congestion and simply gives ISP's more ammo to use in their excuses to start metering internet service. You can stream mp3 or Vorbis and use a fraction of the bandwidth a FLAC file would and have a perceptually identical listening experience.

If you plan to actually transfer a copy of the song to the client for repeated use, then by all means send a FLAC. But, for on the fly listening that isn't intended to be kept on the client, FLAC is a waste of network resources.

Yes, it is technically possible to stream FLAC. You may have to encapsulate it in an Ogg container though, instead of plain FLAC - I'm not quite sure, since I've never tried to do it. It'll also depend on what your player has support for.

I could see FLAC making sense for LAN streaming when you've got bandwidth to burn. However, if the streams are going out over the internet, it's a better idea to stick to lossy codecs, simply for bandwidth reasons. There's plenty of people who are on connections 1.5 megabit or slower, who won't be able to stream FLAC in real time. If you're streaming to more than a few people, it might also increase your bandwidth costs, since you're going to be using 5x what you need to.

2. budget is not the problem neither. Cause we kind of have the proper CDN network, server sources, etc, there is no much extra money to be spent for streaming flac file specifically.

Really? FLAC files are roughly 3-4 times as large as typical streaming MP3 files, so if FLAC streaming becomes the norm then the network has to be sized to cope with 3-4 times as much streaming, near-real time traffic in the core and transport layers. That translates into higher charges for your broadband connection, to recover the cost of the additional infrastructure.

You might want to read some articles on carrier network traffic engineering before making any more sweeping statements like that.

@Outboros: aimed at your post, several other posts in this thread and even at posts from a similar older thread. Yes, FLAC requires more bandwidth. We get it. I'm assuming pretty much anyone who knows about FLAC/lossless knows it and certainly anyone with enough technical knowledge to consider setting up an internet stream knows it.

Not true. Many (actually, in my experience almost all) people who work in the application space make the naive simplifying assumption that network capacity is provisioned and scales linearly for all traffic types, and is effectively free, and neither of these is true. I design networks for a living, and spend much of my time explaining basic traffic engineering to apps developers and architects who have absolutely no idea about what really goes on in "The Internet", or in their corporate VPN. Once it's explained to them they understand it, it's just that they never think about it until prompted.

I wasn't trying to tell the OP not to stream FLAC, I was simply pointing out his flawed logic in assuming that there would be "not much extra money to be spent" - that may be true for the end point, but not necessarily for the transport network.